Sunday, 30 September 2012

“Is the Iphone5 available in London?” his brother,
texted him from Dubai.

“I’m texting you from one. We live in the first world…”
was his sardonic reply.

Having satisfactorily broken the heart of his younger sibling, my husband proceeded to
banter with his new best friend. It was thus I found him, deep in discussion with
Siri as I walked in the door the evening after the acquisition of his second
most prized possession. For the next ten minutes I could well have been a fly
on the wall or someone invisible as he proceeded to test Siri on various trick
questions first in an Indian and then when that wasn’t always successful an
Anglicised-Indian accent which seemed to take him more places, till the big one
came along

As my husband looked at me for the first time—well at-least that
drew his attention to the living human presence next to him, I could argue—with
a face like thunder, I realised that Siri had met his waterloo fittingly in
that last bastion of sub-continent passion. No longer played as widely in the
land of its birth, it is the colonies where this game thrives. Far from the
original gentleman’s game played in white flannels, it lives and thrives in its
adrenaline charged T20 avatar, reinvented by the gods of billion dollar
sponsorships aka IPL, kissed by shapely Bollywood starlets and courted by cricket
athletes, all getting a new lease of retirement fund. A vicious Molotov of sex,
flicks & cricket which never fails to turn the screen into a black hole of
ratings, much to the frustration of TV executives around the world.

Sadly
I am one of the only non-ladettes Indian style, having never really followed cricket.
Though that’s not strictly true, for during my teenage years, I did for a
while, passionately follow the travails of the Indian cricket. From the victory
in the Prudential World Cup in 1983, to the
World Championship of Cricketin
Australia in 1985 when I was up at 4 am to watch Ravi Shastri do the victory
lap in his newly minted Audi wearing the Champion
of Champions crown. I suspect this was more to do with watching the team
play in exotic locales (cue my twenties wanderlust) and the obligatory
champagne spray (cue an alcohol riddled middle age) on winning. Yet moving to
the UK a decade ago, and discovering that cricket was a rather elite occupation,
strictly something which united us desis,
I find I have been drawn to hang onto my bat & ball playing heritage. Not
only is it the only game I actually know the rules to, I find that I take a
perverse pleasure in the fact that most of my American friends are baffled by
the game and many of my British born ones simply think of it as being quiry, slightly
off the beaten track. It’s a perfect fit for a middle class South Indian like
me who welcomes any opportunity to profess intellectual superiority, by
claiming entry to what is fast becoming an exclusive club at least in the UK.
But, when I dig deeper I find that by claiming knowledge of cricket, I am
actually hanging onto my identity as an Indian. Nothing defines where I come
from than the bewildering passion of my home country for this
at-heart-scholarly game, where it has been elevated to dizzying heights of
desire. Given there are 1.7 billion fans of this game in the subcontinent, and
many more in ex-colonies around the world, I think Apple is missing a trick
here. The original projections were for the 8million sales of the Iphone5 to boost
the American economy by 0.5%. But, I wager that giving Siri the cricket touch,
could top that by quite a bit. Plus, like Google Voice, they could incorporate
a South Asian accent setting. What do you think?

Should Siri be cricket friendly
in his next reincarnation? I’d love to hear from you on this.

About Laxmi Hariharan (in my words): Though born in
India, wanderlust drove me out of my home country and I lived in Singapore and
Hong Kong before being based in London where I now live. I am inspired by
Indian mythology. It was in embracing my roots that I found my voice. My debut
novel The Destiny of Shaitan is
available on Amazon http://tiny.cc/szqsew. Reach me here: